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Bizarre Newsweek labor ghost

So you are rolling through the Newsweek story on tensions in American labor and how they may hurt the Democratic Party and then you hit this ghost -- which is left unexplained by Howard Fineman, of all people. Boooo! There is, you see, a showdown looming between "Change to Win" coalition leader Andy Stern and AFL president John Sweeney. It's complicated, so check out the story. But here is the part that spooked me:

Some say [Stern] has another agenda, which is to take over the AFL-CIO from his former SEIU colleague Sweeney, who is half a generation older and cut from a different cloth: a Dorothy Day social activist from the working-class Bronx, N.Y., versus Stern, whose grandparents were members of an exclusive German-Jewish country club and who is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

OK, so it's a class reference. But you can't help but note the Catholic Worker tag on one side and the "German-Jewish" label on the other. Say what precisely is being said here?